Beer Bottle Grace
by Laura of Maychoria
Summary: In Which There Are Far Too Many Blankety-Blanks for Dean to Deal with, Sam Is a Genius Somehow, and Castiel Is Not Where He's Supposed to Be Because He's Dead or Something (Written in the S7 mid-season break. AU now, obvs.)


Oh hey I never posted this here what is wrong with me. I wrote in the mid-season break of S7 so I dunno what took me so long to put it here. Anyway, an alternate version of that whole leviathan thing. This is how I do fix-it fic. I guess. Sorry for Dean's potty mouth in the beginning. He has a lot of emotions. It cools down pretty quickly.

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**Beer Bottle Grace**

It started that night they did couples therapy for those two scary evil witches with their bitchy faces and bitchy voices and bitchy bitch problems. Dean did not have a high opinion of those two witches. And someday he and Sammy were going to go back and gank those bitch witches, for sure, as soon as they had a plan that had an ice cube's chance in Hades of actually working. But for now they'd gotten out of it alive and they'd put a probably temporary stop to the bitchiness which had ended up killing so many innocent people, and that was as close they were going to get to a win with these bitches, so Dean was taking it.

But anyway. As annoying as that had been, the night wasn't even over. They'd gone back to the motel and immediately been ambushed by a freakin' bitch leviathan bounty hunter, and that added up to three more bitches than Dean was capable of dealing with in one day (his bitchy little brother being always the first and only bitch he was capable of dealing with in one day, of course).

So, the bitch leviathan snuck up on them and was all gloating and stuff and Dean totally thought he and Sam were both dead because they still didn't know how to kill these bitches. The leviathan did some posturing and they waited for him to get on with it already, because seriously. Lame. Finally the leviathan started moving toward them, all malevolent and deadly like, and Sam and Dean braced themselves.

But then there was this flash of bright white light. The leviathan went all slack-jawed with shock and fell over, heavily, like a felled tree, and made an awesome thump when he landed on the ground. It was like Harry Potter or something.

Dean looked up, expecting maybe that bitch male witch to have followed them and maybe taken out the leviathan because, Dean didn't know, it was interesting or something. But there was no one there, just the leviathan, on the ground and smoking a little. Dean waited a second, then took a step closer, then another one, and poked it with his foot.

The leviathan didn't move, but Dean didn't think it was dead. Just pole-axed. The after-image of the white light that had split the air still lingered in Dean's eyes. It reminded him of...

Well, damn it, it reminded him of Cas. Cas and his freaky angel powers and the bursts of holy light killing a diner full of monsters or banishing a warehouse full of angels or, you know, dying way too many times in light and explosions and bursts of black goo. But Castiel wasn't here, where he was obviously _supposed_ to be, because he was dead. Again. For the last time. And that pissed Dean off and also made him sad, so he quit thinking about it, cut the thought off before it could get any further, and stuffed it way, way down.

"Was that..." Sam's voice, slow and amazed. "What was that white light?"

Dean shrugged, staring at the downed leviathan. "Dunno. I don't think this bitch did it on purpose, though."

"It kinda looked like..." Sam's voice went even slower. "It kinda looked like Cas."

Dean turned around to glare at him, because no way. Dean had made it very clear that they didn't. Talk. About Cas. "Yeah, genius? Well, Cas isn't here and isn't ever going to be again, so it must have been something else. Any other theories?"

Sam crossed over to prod the leviathan with his foot, pretty much exactly like Dean had done. "One of the witches casting a spell?"

Dean looked around. "Then why haven't they stepped forward to take credit? They're not exactly the quiet do-gooder types. They probably still hate us, actually, because they are bitches."

Sam nodded. "We should check the room for hexes before we go to sleep. Right now, actually. Or anyway, after we tie up this leviathan, because I don't think he's going to stay unconscious forever."

"Yeah."

They got the chains from the trunk, seldom used but always kept just in case. When Dean knelt down to start wrapping their enemy in heavy links of iron, though, he paused, because... "What the hell?"

There on the leviathan's back glimmered a drop of light, no bigger than a pinprick. It glowed white and pure, rolling around in the folds of the creature's shirt like a bit of mercury, silvery and distinct. It almost seemed alive, the light shimmering out of it seeming to change by no outside influence, casting an infinitesimal shadow of sun on the roof and walls, like the reflection of moonlight off waves.

"I don't... What the hell," Dean repeated. "Sam, you seeing this?"

Sam knelt beside him to stare at the droplet. "I... God, Dean, is that grace?"

Dean stared at him, wide-eyed.

"It looks like the stuff that was in the vial Anna threw on the floor in that barn, remember? And... I don't know, it looks the same. It's..."

Dean stared at him, back to the liquid light, back to Sam.

Sam bit his lip. "I think it's Castiel."

"Cas," Dean whispered.

Sam nodded. "Cas."

"Then how...?"

"When the leviathans burst out of his vessel. They must have taken bits of Cas with them." Sam's eyes widened in realization, and his voice took on a hum of excitement. "When this one tried to hurt us, Dean. Castiel didn't let it. That was the flash of light. He objected."

Dean couldn't breathe.

Sam's hand was hard around his bicep, gripping tight. "Oh, God. Cas is alive. He's ripped up into a million tiny pieces, but he's alive."

Dean just stared at him. He really wasn't sure how Sam had managed these leaps of logic. Kid must be a genius, somehow.

Dean never would have thought that, imagined that. Never would have allowed himself to think for even the smallest second that Cas might still be alive, somehow, somewhere, in any form. He wouldn't have let himself.

It was a good thing he had Sam around, he thought, suddenly humble.

Sam let go of him and stumbled to his feet, searching around the room. "We gotta collect it somehow. Keep it safe."

While Sam muttered around, pawing through their belongings with various rustlings and bangs, Dean stared at the drop of light. God, it was pretty. Tiny and shining and beautiful. Without him quite noticing, his hand crept toward it, fingers trembling lightly. His hand stopped a fraction of an inch away, hesitant to cross that last distance. Then the piece of grace brightened, almost blindingly intense. Lighting up as if glad at his presence.

Dean pulled in a breath, held it, and touched the light. It was warm, seeming even warmer as his fingers lay against it, and through him washed the clearest feeling of relief. Whether it was his or the light's he couldn't have said. Then joy, spreading through him from the toes of his boots to the ends of his hair. And peace. And love.

He blew out his held breath and turned his hand over, and the droplet of grace clung to his fingers and rolled into his palm, where it pulsated gently. It was a living creature, nestling against his skin and happy to be there. If a drop of light could purr, that was what it was doing. Dean lifted his hand closer to his face and just stared, transfixed.

"Here." Sam returned with a beer bottle, one of Dean's empties from the night before. "This is the best I could find. Let's keep it safe, yeah?"

Dean held still for a moment, reluctant to give up this spark of happiness and warmth. Sam jerked the bottle's opening toward his hand, insistent, and Dean sighed. He rested the edge of his hand against the neck and tipped his palm, letting the drop of grace roll down into the bottle. It fell to the bottom and mingled with the trace of beer there, instantly subdued and dimmed, hidden inside the brown glass, away from the warmth of Dean's skin. If Sam and Dean hadn't known it was there, they never would have noticed it.

"We'll find a better container when we get a chance," Sam promised.

Somehow they never did, though.

X

With the unwilling help of that stupid bounty hunter bitch, Bobby figured out how to hurt the leviathans, though not kill them. It was close enough. More than enough, really, since every time after that when a leviathan got close enough to hurt one of them, that flash of light went off and it fell down, stunned and paralyzed. Sam and Dean learned how to burn them with borax, chop off their heads and bury them in concrete. And every time, that little drop of grace appeared, and Dean gathered it in his hand and welcomed a piece of Castiel back into his life.

He found a cork from an old wine bottle to cap the beer bottle with, and kept it sheltered in a special corner of his duffel bag. The trace of beer left in the bottle had burnt out, the bottle warm to the touch like something alive and breathing. As the drops built up, piece by piece, bit by bit, the glow of them emanated from the beer bottle in a warm brown light even with the cork on, like a particularly weird lantern. Sometimes in the motels, Dean set the beer bottle on the stand by the bed and watched it glow until he fell asleep. On such nights he did not dream, and there was no blood and death and horror living in his head.

So after awhile he started doing it every night.

They followed a trail of turducken to a warehouse just full to the brim with the bitches, and Bobby was along for that one, so they found out that the bits of Cas didn't have quite the same reaction to Bobby being in trouble as they did to Sam and Dean being in trouble. Which was awkward, because Dean could tell the guy was a little hurt by it.

"I'm sure Cas, you know, likes you," Dean said, after Bobby spent a few minutes staring mournfully at the body of a leviathan that had been in the middle of trying to kill him when Dean came around the corner and downed it with borax and a machete. Dean was currently kneeling by the body, searching around for the drop of grace. Tiny bitch seemed to hiding somewhere in the folds of this guy's unnecessarily complicated jacket-and-vest combo, and wasn't that just the way.

"But I've seen 'em," Bobby said. "When one of 'em even _thinks_ about hurting you boys—BAM. Angel KO."

"Well, the grace drops haven't been saving all the random civilians these guys have been eating, either," Dean said, unbuttoning the leviathan's vest and hoping to God Almighty that he wouldn't have to unbutton the shirt below, too. "Their perception is probably just, like, really limited. If he could, Cas would stop of all this, you know that. It's just..."

"It's just that his protective instincts for you two are real, real visceral." Bobby sighed. "I get it."

Dean tilted his head. He hadn't thought about it in quite that way, but it sounded right. Visceral protective instincts. Yeah, that was Cas. Those visceral protective instincts had sure gotten him into a lot of trouble, too. Like currently being chopped up into angel mincemeat and spread over all of North America.

Ah, there was the little droplet of light, hiding in the hollow of the leviathan's throat right under his collar. Dean reached for it, and for the first time, the bit of grace actually seemed to shrink away from his touch. Dean paused, nonplussed, then reached for it again, and this time the drop reluctantly rolled into his hand, like something small and shy coaxed out of hiding.

Dean lifted his hand, and the droplet sneaked behind one of his fingers as Bobby craned to look at it. "Aww, he's embarrassed," Dean said, gratified and charmed. "See, he totally woulda saved you if he'd realized it was you."

The bit of grace glowed brighter at this, as if in agreement, and Dean grinned at Bobby, who huffed and rolled his eyes.

Dean let the drop of light roll into his breast pocket, to join the others he'd already collected that day. He didn't bring the bottle along on hunts for risk of breaking it, but the pieces of Castiel were always content to rest in that pocket, over his heart. He would reunite them with their fellows in the beer bottle at the end of the day, watching their joyful shimmer and glow as they recognized each other and joined into one.

What he'd said to Bobby was proved right later that day, when the droplet of grace in Dick Roman managed to keep him from actually killing Bobby, though Bobby came out of it with a graze on the head and a trip to the hospital. So that was cool. Dick must have been stronger than the other leviathans, though, 'cause the bit of Cas didn't knock him out. They would have to go back for that piece later, once they figured out a better way of killing leviathans.

X

They kept at it. Almost every week brought them another leviathan or two, on the ground as soon as it tried to attack, grace gathered, head cut off. Bobby had smuggled enough information out of Roman's office to figure out something of their plans. Nationwide distribution of mind-altering drugs hidden in the meat, an unwitting populace made into nothing but a complacent herd for the leviathans to feed on. The three of them disrupted it everywhere they could and slowly built a network of hunters to join the resistance.

Another underground war, like all the others Sam and Dean had fought over the years. This time they weren't just trying to avenge their mother or father, or save the world from an overwhelming and barely understood catastrophe. They were also trying to save their friend, Cas, who had made horrible mistakes and was paying for them, whom they missed and loved and wanted to see again. It put a new spin on things, made the whole sorry business both easier and harder for all three of them. Easier because they never had to question it, never had to wonder whether it was worth all the trouble and pain. Harder because the stakes were so personal, and none of them could bear the idea of failing.

X

They found the body in a warehouse in Des Moines.

Keeping track of the leviathans' activity had led to some interesting discoveries. Bobby kept records of the way they moved, the distribution chains they were setting up, the networks of shipping lines and chicken farms and processing plants. The warehouse had been an outlier—not part of the system the leviathans were creating, yet still somehow important to Dick Roman and his posse. Regular guards, that sort of thing. Mentioned in passing on purloined documents, never in the important places, just in the notes at the bottom.

Dean was sorry, now, that they'd left the warehouse for so long before they checked it out. There had always been something more urgent, somewhere else they needed to be. The warehouse in Des Moines kept being a problem for tomorrow, later, maybe next week.

And now here they were in some sort of makeshift hospital room complete with curtains, monitoring equipment, and a professional-looking chart on the foot of the bed. A hospital room in the middle of a warehouse guarded by leviathans. And in the bed was a body that looked an awful lot like someone they knew.

"Is...is it Jimmy?" Sam asked. They were standing at the opening of the curtains, beheaded leviathans scattered across the empty concrete floor of the warehouse behind them. And they stood there and they stared into the hospital room at that pale face resting limp and heavy on a crisp hospital pillow. "I mean, he just...he looks so small."

Dean shook himself out of his paralysis and stomped over to the bed, angry for reasons he couldn't quite articulate even to himself._That poor bastard_ and _that stupid idiot_ were arm-wrestling in his head for first place, and he wasn't sure yet which would win.

What he said, though, as he leaned over Castiel's stupid blank face looking almost translucent against the pillow, looking almost dead and gone and buried long ago, was, "Wake up, you fucker. You wake the fuck up right this instant or I swear to God I will never speak to you again."

Predictably, Cas didn't react. Didn't so much as twitch in his sleep, the bitch.

Sam, the geek, had lifted the clipboard from the foot of the bed and was reading the chart, holding up page after page as he went back and back through the whole thing. "Dude, he's been in a coma for long time. Since the reservoir. They've been keeping him alive but... I can't figure out why."

"Maybe they were saving him for dessert." Dean kept himself from slapping Cas in his stupid face, but only just. "Who cares. We got him back and that's all that matters."

Dean stood back from the bed, just in time catch one of Sam's sympathy-faces, the kind he gave to civilians when they were talking about someone who had just died. And that made Dean want to punch him, but again, he held back, because Dean was a fucking saint.

"Like I said, man, maybe that's just Jimmy. We've got Cas back in a beer bottle in the car."

"Whatever." Dean shrugged and starting pulling plugs out of all the machines. "Time to get the band back together, Elwood."

The body was wearing a hospital gown, and it was covered in scars. Long thin ones, small puckered ones, all over his body. They were all the same age, too. Not fresh, but not all that old. The leviathans had burst out of poor Jimmy Novak and taken all the bits of Castiel with them, and they'd left poor ol' Jimmy riddled with holes in the process. And then, for some reason, they'd saved him and kept him in a warehouse.

Dean really wasn't going to look the gift Cas-shaped body in the mouth, but Sam just wouldn't shut up about how weird it was. He didn't shut up as they unhooked the equipment and cleared a path and pushed the wheeled bed out to the Impala. He didn't shut up while they loaded the body in the back seat and went back and cleaned up the leviathan heads and packed them in a box for future burial. He didn't shut up while they got in the car and Sam called Bobby to tell him what to expect, and then he and Bobby went and had a nice long conversation about how weird it was while Dean turned up the volume of one of his five favorite albums, hoping either to drown Sam out or wake Cas up.

The second desire was mostly subconscious and unacknowledged, but every now and then his eyes slipped to the rearview mirror, hoping to see Castiel jerking up out of his somnolence, sputtering and indignant and demanding to know what the fuck was going on and where they were going and what the hell Dean had done with his _coat._

Or, you know, even a twitch would be nice.

Unfortunately for Dean, neither hope was fulfilled, and Sam kept yammering and Castiel and/or Jimmy didn't move, all the way to Bobby's latest safe house.

X

So yeah, it was weird, and Bobby didn't know what to do with the body any more than Sam and Dean did. They ended up with the Jimmy-body on the couch of a shack in southern Illinois, and Dean standing there with the beer bottle with its trickle of grace inside, staring down at the Jimmy-body. It was like having a jigsaw puzzle with only two pieces and still no idea at all of how to put it together, and that was stupid and frustrating and dumb, so none of them wanted to point it out, so they just stood there and kind of looked at each other.

"Maybe if we..." Dean lowered the beer bottle hesitantly toward the body, and the grace glowed dully, but didn't seem at all excited about this idea.

"Or if we..." He tilted it more toward the body's mouth, and the grace's glow actually got dimmer instead of brighter.

"Or maybe..." He mimed just throwing the bottle down on the ground, smashing it like Anna had smashed the vial in the barn in Kentucky, and the grace flared briefly, indignant, then settled down to almost not shining at all, barely visible through the brown glass. Obviously calling him a dumbshit for that idea, and yeah, Dean _was_ kind of a dumbshit, but c'mon.

So he just looked at Sam and Bobby and shrugged.

They shrugged back at him. Nobody had a manual on angel grace and comatose vessels.

Dean lifted the beer bottle to his face and frowned in at the collection of Cas-bits. "Hey, Miller Time, if you have any ideas, feel free to let me know."

The grace churned briefly in the bottle, but it could have been just from him moving it around. No information coming that quarter, either.

Dean sighed down at Jimmy's body. He did feel bad for the bastard. After having his face splashed all over the news not long ago, he could never go home again. And being an angelic vessel wasn't all that fun, especially an archangel-strength one, or a mutated one with god-like powers. Maybe Jimmy was all used up now, like the vessel of Raphael they'd seen in Maine. Or maybe when Cas got the souls stripped out of him, Jimmy had gone, too. Dean hoped not. Novak didn't deserve to go to purgatory with a bunch of monster souls.

He couldn't resist reaching out to poke the poor guy in the ribs. Jimmy didn't react. His body just shifted slightly with the poke, then settled back when Dean retreated.

Dean prodded him one more time for good measure, and this time Sam was the one who sighed. "Dude, quit poking the comatose guy."

"Never mind getting Cas back in his body," Bobby said. "We still don't even know why the leviathans were keeping him. You shoulda at least left one of the guards alive so we could question him."

Sam lit up. "We've got all the heads in the trunk."

This part was really gross. It turned out that Bobby was really, truly, grossly resourceful, and well, Dean had always known that, but he'd never seen it close up like this. There were...hoses. And like, these balloon things. And they had to pump them. And the severed leviathan head was, like, propped up with a hose stuck in...and yeah. It was gross.

All the first head did was scream. In a high-pitched whine with no power to it that cut off whenever they quit pumping air into the head, but still. Dean winced, looking at the body of Novak-or-possibly-Cas, but the guy continued obstinately not reacting to anything. Eventually Sam got frustrated and punched that head in the jaw, knocking it across the room in a disgusting spray of goo. The gigantor sighed at Bobby and Dean's twin looks of disapproval.

"Yeah, yeah, I'll clean up my own mess," he muttered, already moving over with a dustpan to scoop up the head.

"Bring a different one!" Dean called as Sam headed out the door with it, back to the box in the trunk.

Bobby injected the next one with morphine, and it laughed at them for a good ten minutes, giddy and idiotic and bitchy. Damn, but Dean wanted to punch this one, too. He held himself back, though, because, again. Saint. This leviathan just thought they were_hilarious._

"It was going to be so funny," the head finally got out between gasps and chokes of laughter. "It was gonna be so fucking funny, when you finally met your old pal again, and you hugged him and squeezed him and called him George, and then he _killed you."_

Dean had seen a lot, okay, he'd seen Death and he'd seen the Devil; he'd seen the Devil inside his little brother. It took a lot to make his blood run cold. But the wheezing voice of a laughing leviathan, talking with borrowed air forced through his throat, saying that Cas was gonna kill them... Yeah, that did the trick.

"What are you talking about?" Dean leaned toward the leviathan, forcing the words out through gritted teeth. "You were only keeping him around to possess him?"

The leviathan's eyes rolled in his head. "Copy him, moron. We don't need your frail, delicious meat, except for eating. We aren't_demons."_ It laughed again, loud and shrill. "It would have been so hilarious, if you lived after the first one turned on you, and then you saw a dozen of your poor ol' friend coming to get you..."

They waited out the laughing. Bobby quit pumping the air and they just sat there, staring at it, watching its mouth move, creepy and silent. At last it calmed down, and Sam asked another question.

"Your boss didn't seem to think we were that much of a problem. Seemed to think he could take us down any day he wanted to. He hasn't succeeded yet, but he was pretty sure of himself before we kept surviving anyway. Yet you kept Cas alive from the very beginning. Why?"

The head twitched. It might have been a shrug. "Contingency, just in case. Didn't expect to need it, but big boss man covers all the angles. We're smarter than you, see. And personally, I was hoping we'd get to use this plan." A wide, vicious smile. "It was going to be so _funny."_

This time Dean knocked it across the room, and the others let him.

When Dean came back from putting the head in the car, Sam was standing by the sofa, arms crossed over his chest, one hand holding his chin as he stared down at the limp body laying there, just breathing. Dean moved over to stand next to him, also looking down. He didn't have anything to say, so he said nothing.

"When the leviathans copy people, they take their memories, too," Sam said. "They use their mannerisms to keep up the charade, if it suits them. If they were so confident of being able to make a copy that would fool us, there must be something left of Castiel in there, after all."

Dean just stared at the guy. "Yeah. Maybe."

"I guess now we just wait for him to wake up."

Great. More waiting. Dean's favorite thing.

X

Of course, Cas didn't wake up. Dean suspected he was doing it just to be annoying, at this point. Cas could be a bitch like that.

After a day or so, Bobby brought in an IV to keep the body alive, just like the leviathans had been doing. It made Dean feel weird and bad, treating Cas the same way the leviathans had. Except they weren't keeping him alive to use his body as a weapon against his former allies, so that was a plus in their favor.

A few days later, they took out another couple of leviathans down in St. Louis. Dean had left the beer bottle on the end table next to the sofa, near Castiel's head. The grace had seemed happier, being nearer the body in rightfully belonged in. When they came back to the safehouse, Dean fished the two droplets of grace out of his breast pocket to put them in the bottle with the others.

He was kneeling there next to the sofa, holding the bottle in one hand, droplets of grace in the opposite palm. And he could have sworn that Cas's body gave a tiny, almost inaudible sigh. His eyes flew from his hands to Castiel's face, willing him to make that noise again. Cas just lay there, quiet and still, too pale, his cheeks sunken, innumerable scars marking his face and arms where they were visible above the blankets. He looked like the victim of some terrible disease, thin and getting thinner, wasting away to nothing as he slept.

The grace in his hand glowed a little brighter, and Dean stared at it for a second. Something was going on. He looked at Cas again, but there was no guidance to be found there.

For a moment, an awful, horrible, cowardly moment, he didn't want Cas to wake up, after all. That would mean he'd have to deal with him. Have to talk to him about what happened, work something out between them. Have to take back some of things he'd said, maybe, or listen to Castiel's desperate, shame-faced apologies again, and that hadn't even been fun the first time.

But no. Dean wanted his friend back. Even if said friend was changed and saddened, not as pure as he'd been, their friendship not as easy. As if whatever they'd had between them had ever been _easy._ But it was definitely going to be less easy now.

Still. Dean wanted him back. He worked the cork off the beer bottle one-handed and tipped it into his other palm, letting all the grace roll together. It glimmered in his hand, still less than it should be, still reduced and wounded. But still beautiful. Still warm and gleaming and essentially _Cas_ in a way that Dean could never explain.

Working entirely on instinct, Dean set the bottle down and reached for Cas's collar. He pulled the hospital gown's neck open, exposing part of Castiel's pale, scarred chest, and let the grace roll out to rest there.

He watched, hoping, but the grace didn't sink in, didn't absorb like lotion into the skin. It glowed brighter, though, a blue-white radiance filling the room, dancing on Cas's chest like a child brought home. The light flickered across Dean's face, shining in his eyes, and he had to squint, then look away.

He looked to Castiel's face. Cas's breath was quickening, his lips parting like someone about to wake up. And then he opened his eyes.

"Cas," Dean choked out. "Cas, you son of a bitch. You made it."

X

Castiel was dizzy and shaky and weak, and didn't really seem to have any idea of what was going on, but God, it was good to have him back. The first time he woke up, he just stared at Dean for a moment, looked at the grace resting on his chest, then started breathing too fast and panicked himself into passing out. So yeah, that had been fun.

Dean gathered the grace back into the beer bottle again, watching it glow and shine and shimmer even removed from Castiel's skin. The stuff was just s'darn happy to have woken Cas up, it appeared, but it hadn't managed to go home yet. Sam postulated that maybe it couldn't for some reason, maybe they had to have all of the pieces before Cas could take it back. Which was going to be a bitch, but Dean felt like it was doable now. Anything felt possible right now, and it was a good feeling. Weird, but good.

The second time Cas woke up, Dean was sitting next to him in a chair dragged over from the kitchen table, leaning with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped between them, his body bent almost double as he stared fixedly into Cas's face. Bobby had laughed at him for it, for sitting there like a puppy waiting for his owner to play with him, but Dean couldn't help it. He had to be there the second Cas woke up again, had to make sure it was really him.

Cas opened his eyes slowly, then immediately blinked at Dean's proximity, head pulling back against the sofa. He stared at Dean with wide eyes and blown pupils that didn't react quite right to the daylight streaming in the windows. His breath pulsed in his throat, his limbs trembled, and he stared at Dean like he didn't know it was him. Shocky and confused, about ready to panic again, but yeah, it was Cas.

"Hey, hey." Dean spread his hands. "Hey, it's me. You're okay. You're safe now."

Castiel looked around, trying to take it in. His eyes continued to not focus right, and he finally just returned his gaze to Dean's face, lips parted, gulping air. "They were...they were..." His voice was so rough and low as to be almost unintelligible. "I was...what..."

"Hey," Dean said again, and reached forward. He wrapped his hands around Castiel's shoulders, felt how cool and thin and shaking they were. "Hey, you're okay. Calm down, Cas, you're okay."

"I don't... I don't... Dean?"

He sounded so lost. So small. Dean squeezed his shoulders. "It's me, buddy. You're okay."

"Dean." His voice broke, and it made Dean's heart break a little, too. Again. Some more. "They were so strong, Dean."

Dean swallowed. "I know, man. It's okay. It's over now."

"No, it's not," Cas said in the most desolate voice Dean had ever heard, and Dean leaned forward a little closer and pulled him into a hug, because what else was he supposed to do, huh? Nothing. There was nothing else to do.

X

Sam was really good at talking to victims, and Dean loved him for it, he did. He just hated that it was Cas, now, Cas who needed it, who needed Sam's gentle voice and comforting posture and sympathetic eyes. Still, Dean loved that Sam could even have it in him to do this for Cas, after what Cas had done to him. Sam took it all in stride, never a hesitation about him, as if he didn't even remember that it was Cas who had set the devil loose in his head. He had to remember, though. He'd just...set it aside.

Cas didn't seem to remember it at all. He and Sam were sitting side by side on the sofa, Cas dressed in a set of sweats that hung loosely on his thinned-out frame. He held the brown beer bottle in his hand, gazing contemplatively at the grace shining inside. The bottle, light as it was, grew too heavy for his strength, his hand shaking, sinking, until he rested the bottle on his leg, still staring at it instead of meeting their eyes..

"I don't...I don't remember much," Cas said. His voice was shaky, too.

Sam's voice was soothing and rich, his shoulder pressing against Castiel's as if offering his own strength. "Anything you can tell us might be helpful."

"Much of it is a blur." He glanced up, big, shocky blue eyes catching Dean's briefly across the room, and then he looked down again. Yep, this was the contrite Castiel from that bloody basement room, the ashamed, humiliated once god-like being who had been so desperate for Dean's forgiveness and understanding. It kind of hurt to see.

Dean really wasn't the one anyone should be looking to for forgiveness.

"I know I hurt you, though," Cas turned his eyes to Sam, wide and dark. "I don't remember what I did, but I am very, very sorry, Sam."

"I know, man," Sam said. He patted Cas's arm, gentle and warm. "I'm okay. I'm coping."

"It is ongoing?" Castiel's eyes, impossibly, widened even more. "Oh, Samuel. I am so very sorry. I would fix it this instant if I could."

Nothing else had managed to make Sam uncomfortable, not even sitting right next to the guy who had hurt him, the guy he'd stabbed unsuccessfully with the intent to kill. This apology did it, though; he shifted, then went still again. Not pulling away from Cas, not even a little. If anything, he leaned into the other man a bit harder.

"Don't worry about it, Cas. You just get better, and maybe when we get all your grace back..."

Cas stared back to the bottle in his hand. "Perhaps. I have never seen anything like this. I don't know what to do about it."

Sam looked down at the bottle, too. "You've never heard of an angel's grace that doesn't seem...willing to go back to the angel?"

Cas's face fell even further, mournful, regretful. "It is broken and fractured. Much like myself."

Sam shook his head, tsking, but Cas just kept going. The words seemed dragged out of him, reluctant but inevitable.

"Perhaps we are no longer...compatible. Perhaps I am too tainted by my misdeeds to deserve the grace of God within my being anymore."

"Now that's just crazy talk," Dean burst out, and Castiel's gaze flew to him like a startled bird. Dean flushed, but held his ground. "Don't you say that. We're gonna find every last one of these sons of bitches and take their heads, and get back the bits of you that they stole, and we're gonna put you back together, Cas, you hear me? That's what we're gonna do."

Cas held his gaze for about two seconds, then looked away, nodding. Not so much in belief, it seemed, as simply acquiescing to Dean's will. He would nod along to anyone and anything at this moment.

It pissed Dean off. Cas was never supposed to be this...broken. After a second of wavering in his seat, red-faced and unsure what to do, Dean stood and stomped into the next room. He couldn't look at the guy anymore.

It just...it hurt, okay. It hurt. And it was really hard to be mad, like Dean kinda wanted to be, at someone who was so hurt and weak and who barely remembered what he'd done to enrage Dean in the first place. It took two to tango, and Dean had never been much for dancing by himself. Plus Cas kept asking them to forgive him, which made it even harder, and just left all this anger swimming around in Dean with nowhere to go.

He could still hear Sam and Cas in the next room, Sam's voice a low, soothing murmur, Cas's a rough, struggling rasp.

"What do you remember? Do you remember anything from that last month or so, when you got those souls in you and went kind of nuts?"

"I...I hurt a lot of people. I remember that. I thought I was a being a good god, a better god. I thought I was helping. But...I was drunk on power. My judgment was severely impaired. Even so, that I should be capable of such things..."

"We all have that capacity within us, Cas. Dean knows it. I know it."

"It was foolish of me to believe that I was better than you, then."

"Yeah, maybe. It was a hard lesson."

"Very hard, yes. I...I don't want to remember any better than I do now."

A soft clink of metal on wood, the beer bottle rolling away on the floor.

"Here, I'll get that for you."

"Please...give it to Dean to keep for me. I don't want to see it right now."

"Okay."

Dean stood still in the middle of the kitchen/dining room, his arms clenched at his sides. After a couple minutes Sam found him there, holding out the beer bottle with an apologetic look on his ginormous face.

"You heard that?"

"Yeah." Dean hesitated, then accepted the bottle. The grace brightened in his hand, as if greeting him. "I'll keep it safe till we get it all together again."

Sam nodded. "Um... I was gonna ask him what he knew about leviathans, if he knew how to kill them or anything, but he fell asleep again. We can ask him next time he wakes up."

"Yeah."

"He's gonna be okay. You know that, right? He's just been comatose for a long time. It takes time to build up your strength from that."

"Yeah, I know. It sucks not having that powerful angel up our sleeve anymore, though."

Sam gave him a disapproving head tilt. "I think you mean it sucks seeing one of our friends feeling so down and sick."

"Yeah, that too."

Sam blew a sigh through his nose. "C'mon, man. You were so eager to get him back, you could hardly talk about anything else. And now that he's here you can't stand to be in the same room?"

Dean sputtered, then, "Well, and how about you? He broke the wall in your head, you stabbed him in the freaking back. That doesn't bother either of you?"

"Not really, no."

"Well, why not?" Dean spread his hands, almost flailing, then caught himself and hugged the bottle to his chest.

"We both thought we were doing what we had to do, at the time. To save the world. It didn't make either of us happy then, and it doesn't now, but we understand each other's motivations."

"That doesn't even make sense."

Sam frowned. "Of course it does. This is the world we live in, dude. We made ourselves kind of unfit for polite company in trying to save it, but at least we have each other. We're all unfit together."

Dean just had to laugh, incredulous and a touch hysterical. "God damn it, Sam. How can you be so copacetic?"

"Are you really..." Sam paused. "Are you really upset that we don't hate each other?"

Dean shook his head and had to leave then. He had no answer, and he wasn't sure he wanted to find one.

X

As often happened, Dean ended up driving. He stopped in the next town over and picked up a six-pack, barely paying attention the brand, just grabbing whatever was close to the register, and he drove. The six-pack rested in the footwell of the passenger side, and the beer bottle, with its little collection of grace, nested in the curve of the bench seat on Sam's side, where heavy Winchester asses sitting for long hours had worn an impression in the foam and fabric. He didn't look at it as he drove, didn't think about the faint flickers of grace-light floating over his right side, all but caressing his cheek, his forehead. He just drove.

He found an empty stretch of country road, watched over by a backdrop of stars. It was far enough out that the lights of sparse civilization were barely noticeable, and the dark was deep and clear and cold, the moon and stars bright sparks above. The cool thing about being this far out into rural farmland, Dean thought as he sat on his baby's hood and drank his beers, was that without all that light, the more he looked at the stars, the more there seemed to be.

They multiplied the longer he looked at them, those stars, until they were no longer lonely spots in the night. They were swaths and phalanxes of individual pinpricks blending into each other, scores and centuries and myriads of them. The belt of the Milky Way was broad and bright, marching into invisibility from horizon to horizon, and even outside that band the stars were innumerable. They were the heavenly hosts, pretty much, but these didn't come down to earth to meddle and kill and try to start or re-start the Apocalypse. They were just there, distant and beautiful.

Dean much preferred the heavenly host like that.

Except for one particular little pinprick of light, maybe. Dean glanced behind him, into the car where he'd left the beer bottle grace. It was still there, shining blue through the brown glass like some kind of whacked-out nightlight. Yeah, he liked having Cas around. Didn't stop him from being stupidly, inexplicably angry at him at strange times and for little reason, but Dean was glad to have the nerdy dude back, with or without his wings.

Feeling a bit more satisfied with himself, Dean slid off the hood and started collecting his empties in the box, ready to head back to the shack, to Sam and Bobby and their miraculously-returned-to-them little angel dude. And it was then that three leviathans rose out of the ditch, laughing and hooting as they surrounded him.

"Well, well, if it isn't the mighty Dean Winchester, all alone out in the wilderness," said one that seemed to be the leader, a body-building type with a leather motorcycle jacket and grease stains on his jeans.

He grinned, low and feral, and Dean grinned back, tight, exultant. Because he and Sam kept taking the heads of all the leviathans they came across (except Dick Roman, damn him, and that was only a matter of time), the creatures from the black goo hadn't yet figured out what exactly having a tiny bit of Cas's grace inside each of them was going to do when they dared attack a Winchester.

The three of them had him circled, and he was trapped and cut off, too far from the weapons in the trunk, only a useless knife on his belt. But he wasn't the least bit afraid.

"Caught you by yourself, idiot," another one said, a snappy blonde who smiled with nicotine-stained teeth. "No backup, no brother. Did you really think this wouldn't happen?"

The third just licked his lips, eyeing Dean up and down like a t-bone steak.

"We've been waiting for you awhile." The leader tipped his chin forward in an arrogant tilt. "Knew all we had to do was hang around a liquor store and you'd show up eventually. Did you enjoy your beers? I hate to make a man die thirsty."

"Yeah, I enjoyed 'em," Dean said, and he lowered himself into a fighting crouch and gestured with both hands. "Come on. Come and get me."

"Good for you. We like our meat marinated."

They rushed him all at once. If it hadn't been for Cas, that would have been it. Dean would have been lunch. Instead, three flashes of blinding white light split the night, forcing Dean to close his dark-acclimated eyes, and then there were three bodies scattered on the ground around him. None of them had even touched his boot.

Because they were wrong. He wasn't alone at all. He'd had angelic backup on his side again, just like in the good old days of the original Apocalypse, when he could call on Cas and Cas could call on him, and it had never felt like an obligation or a burden on either side.

Dean knelt by the bodies and started searching for those tiny drops of grace, not the least bit surprised to find them rolling out to meet him. Cas was always glad to see him, even when he wasn't. And Dean was always glad to see _him,_ even when he didn't think he was.

Then he realized why he was so angry with Cas. He finally understood. It was because Cas had left him, hadn't even said good-bye. Dean's backup, his ace in the hole, his stupid bitchy nerd-ass friend...had _left_ him, just like that, and Dean hadn't been able to handle it at all.

Dean was sick of people leaving, had been since he was four years old, but somehow he'd believed—stupidly, hopelessly—that an immortal angelic being was the one person who wouldn't. Even when he got smote to death by archangels, twice, even when Dean banished him himself in a moment of desperation and idiocy, even when Cas took himself off to be a god...he'd come back. Again and again. Dean had gotten used to it.

Then Castiel had quit doing it, for these last few months since that horrible day at the reservoir. He hadn't come back, had just left Dean to stew in his misery and his alcohol and his bad fucking dreams. Unbearable, that was what he had been. Just...unbearable.

Now Dean had gotten Cas back in the body, contrite and pathetic and damnably human, but Castiel hadn't understood to apologize for that particular part of it. For leaving. Dean hadn't figured out how to forgive him for it, either. Not yet.

Dean found each drop of grace on the leviathans, gathered them nestled in his palm, and watched the shining light warm against his skin. Here was proof, though. Proof that Cas had never really left at all. Even as barely sentient, weird-ass little droplets of liquid light, he'd had Dean's back at every turn.

"Thanks, guys," Dean whispered, and he put the grace in the bottle with the rest. He chopped the heads off the leviathans, put them in the trunk, and went back to the safe house and his family.

X

"I don't understand."

Cas was shaky, again, as usual, and his eyes weren't quite focusing. Again. Dean was kneeling on one knee by the sofa, trying to look in his face, trying to catch his eye. It didn't used to be this difficult. It used to be hard to make Cas _break_ eye contact, not _make_ it.

"We have to move," Dean repeated patiently. "The leviathans were waiting for me in town. They know we have a hidey hole somewhere near by, so we gotta find another safe house. Bobby and Sam are packing up right now." He pointed a thumb over his shoulder in their general direction.

"No, I understand why you must go." Cas's hands wavered in the air between them, as if wanting to push Dean away but unwilling to cross the distance between them, unwilling to reach out and touch. "It's dangerous and...and you must stay safe."

"Then what's the problem, here, buddy? C'mon, we gotta get you ready to go. I've got shoes here, and a coat. It's cold outside. Let me help you bundle up."

Cas shook his head. "I don't understand why you're taking the trouble to bring me along. I'm useless to you now, a burden. You should leave me and go."

Dean had to bite his lip to keep from screaming. "Not gonna happen." And yeah, he knew that his voice was abruptly severe, his gentle tone dropping away, but he didn't mean to make Cas _flinch_ like that.

"Cas." Dean reached forward and grabbed those thin, shaking hands in his. He pressed Castiel's hands together, palm to palm, and held them between his own, trying to warm them, trying to still them. Cas just persisted in shaking and shivering, though, the stubborn bastard. "We're not leaving you. Don't even think like that."

"But I don't...I don't..." Cas's voice hitched.

"Don't what?" Dean pulled an inward sigh but tried not to let it show. Since his revelation of a few hours ago, he'd been trying to show Cas that he understood, that asking forgiveness wasn't necessary because it was already given. He wasn't angry anymore, not really, but it was hard not to get snippy when Cas was being so damn obtuse. "Don't want to go with us? Don't trust us to look out for you?"

"I d-don't deserve..."

"It's not about deserving." Dean thought about what Sam had said earlier. _We're all unfit together._ His baby bro really was sort of a genius, somehow. "You're one of us. We don't give up on family."

Cas stared at him, his face open and helpless, split open to show a deep pit of yearning inside. Dean had finally found a way to make him meet his eyes, apparently. When he spoke, it was just one word, hoarse and broken. "..Still?"

"Still, Cas. Always. Okay? Always."

Cas lowered his head, shaking all over. Dean held his hands a little tighter. "We're gonna fix this, dude. We will."

"I don't know if we can. I never..." Cas's hands spasmed inside Dean's, but he didn't try to pull away. "The purgatory spell. I remember planning, though the execution is a blur. I never expected to survive it, just to stop Raphael. To take the Apocalypse off the table before I went out forever. I knew it would be too much for me. Part of me...part of me hoped I would die, truthfully, because I knew the alternative. This. I'm a burnt out shell, every bit of me broken and used up."

Dean shook his head, refusing, but Cas just kept going. "This isn't something you fix, Dean. It's just something that is."

"Then we'll deal with it, okay? Just like Sam is dealing with his head thing. Just like I deal with all of my crap."

"Just like I deal with all the idjits in my life," Bobby said behind them, dry as a bone, before continuing into the next room to get another box.

Dean waited until he was gone, then shrugged. "Yeah. Just like that."

Castiel nodded his head, acquiescing, and this time it didn't seem like he was just going along to get along. He was accepting Dean's promise, accepting his place in their stupid, bitchy family, and his shoulders relaxed and his hands finally, finally stopped shaking quite so hard.

"Now, you gonna let me get you into this coat?"

"Yes, Dean. I will let you get me into that coat, whatever it is."

It was Cas's old trench coat, of course, kept, washed and dried. Still stained in places with mud and blood and black goo, still old and beat up, and still as much a part of Castiel as his messy hair and head tilts and solemn curiosity and annoyance at pop culture references. It looked weird on him without the suit, but it was warm.

Dean wrapped his friend in that old coat, and pulled socks over his cold, bony feet, then shoes, and he laced them up and tied them for him. Sam and Bobby had already packed everything they were taking, and Dean pulled Castiel to his feet and helped him outside to the car, an arm around his waist to keep him from stumbling, though by the time they reached the car Cas was white as a ghost and breathing hard. Dean lowered him into the seat, shifting the beer bottle grace aside as they moved.

Then he picked the beer bottle up, reaching across Cas to do so. He held it in his hand for a moment, watching the light shimmer and glow. Cas stared up at him from inside the car, his eyes dark and apprehensive, his cold hands fisted shakily in his lap. Dean quirked a smile, considering, then gave him the bottle.

He had to force it a bit, pushing the bottle gently but insistently into Castiel's jumbled fists, until Cas reluctantly opened to accept these broken parts of himself. His hands curled loosely around the beer bottle grace, unwilling or unable to grip it securely, but he held the bottle in his hands. It was good, Dean thought abstractly, for Cas's hands to not be empty. He hadn't liked seeing them laying in Cas's lap like that, like a symbol of his helplessness, his weakness and uncertainty.

The grace shone, as it always did.

"We're all messed up, Cas," he said. "So it's a little more obvious in your case, since you've got some of the messed up parts of you sitting in a beer bottle in your lap. But we're all in it together, okay? We fill in for each other."

He got in on the driver's side, and Sam came around to the passenger side and made Cas scoot into the middle of the bench seat so he could sit in front too. They kept Cas between them, two warm Winchester bodies on either side of his skinny, shivering body as they started the long trip to a new safe house. Bobby drove behind them in his truck full of books and magic ingredients and hoodoo paraphenalia, and they listened to rock music and talked about monsters.

And they were all sort of broken and burnt out and messed up and sad and awful and scarred in too many ways to count, and they had all done horrible things to save the world, as well as not to save the world, and they were Dean and Sam and Cas, and they just were.

Nothing in the world could stand against them.

(End)


End file.
